Body part measures in Mandarin Chinese

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Date
2014-08-19
Authors
Liu, Yifan
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Abstract
This thesis mainly discusses a lexical category known by the name “classifier” or “measure” in Mandarin Chinese. According to Chinese descriptive grammars, which are followed in this thesis, there are at least two types of classifiers, nominal ones (classifiers for nouns) and verbal/ adverbial ones (classifiers for verbs). Within the category of classifiers, there is a subclass that is made of body part terms. Some of them are used for nouns (i.e., NCLs), some of them are used for verbs (i.e., VCLs), and many for both. The correlations between NCLs and VCLs are discussed in this thesis, especially the idea of how both types of classifier can provide delimitation to events. The semantic properties of VCLs and NCLs are explored in this thesis. The [Num+ CL+ N] construction is considered to be a NCLP (nominal classifier phrase) in this thesis and the [V+ [Num+CL]] construction is considered to be a VCLP. I will discuss VCLPs with respect to transitivity of verbs.
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Keywords
classifier, Mandarin Chinese, body part
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